Monthly Archives: July 2012

When Zach and Ryan started Codecademy last August, they envisioned a place where anyone could come to learn how to code—in any language—to build the things they dreamed of and to use programming more effectively in their everyday lives. Since August, millions of people have used Codecademy to learn awesome front-end technologies like JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and jQuery.

Moving Server-Side—to Python!

We’ve spent the past few months working on adding more languages to Codecademy and the first one (and most requested!) launches today—Python! Python is used by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide. Lots of schools and classes use it as a starter language because of its clean and readable syntax. Advanced developers use it at companies like Google and NASA. It goes nicely as a server-side backend to what many users have learned to do with JavaScript.

In January, we started the shift towards supporting more languages with the release of Codecademy Labs (by Amjad Masad, creator of repl.it and Codecademy team member). Labs ran Ruby and Python on the client side, allowing users to use the interpreter offline (so long as the page had been loaded) with reduced latency. Labs has been an awesome testing ground for the technologies that we’ve built, and we discovered that much of the experimentation with client-side Ruby and Python is constantly broken by updates in browsers.

Everything we’re launching today has been built from the ground up and rearchitected to run Python server-side. The infrastructure we’ve built can help us launch other server-side languages you’ve been asking for sooner than we expected.

Create Your Own!

As with all the other languages, all of our content is created by our users. Think you have what it takes to write a Python course? Create one now!

As someone who learned to code outside of the classroom, I know how important it is to establish a regular routine for applying the concepts that you’re learning. The more frequently you use the concepts that you encounter on Codecademy, the m… Continue reading →